Regional Seismicity in the Vale of Pickering

We have examined both historical and instrumentally
recorded earthquake activity within a 100 km by 100 km
square centred on the Kirby Misperton 8 well from the
BGS earthquake catalogue. This catalogue is a
combination of the historical catalogue of Musson
(1994) and later revisions for the period up to 1969,
and earthquake parameters determined from instrumental
data recorded by the UK National Seismic Monitoring
Network thereafter (Musson, 1996; Baptie, 2012). It
contains almost 10,000 instrumentally recorded local
earthquakes from 1970 to present.

The Vale of Pickering region appears to be an area of low seismicity
even for the UK with little significant recorded earthquake
activity. Historically, the largest earthquake in the region was a
magnitude 3.7 earthquake near Market Weighton in 1885. This had a
maximum intensity of 5 EMS in the epicentral area, equivalent to
shaking strong enough to cause buildings to tremble and top-heavy
objects to topple. There have been a number of instrumentally recorded
earthquakes in the region in the last 40 years with magnitudes in the
range of 2-3 ML. These include: magnitude 2.9 and 3.0 ML earthquakes
near Selby, North Yorkshire in 1978 and 1984 respectively; a magnitude
2.4 ML earthquake near Westerdale North Yorkshire in 1984; a magnitude
2.1 ML earthquake near Sledmere, Humberside in 1992; two earthquakes
near York in 2003 and 2005 with magnitudes of 2.3 and 2.5 and, more
recently, a magnitude 2.9 ML earthquake near Loftus, Cleveland in
2012. None of these earthquakes was within 20 km of Kirby
Misperton.

Historical and instrumentally recorded earthquakes (grey circles) from
the BGS earthquake catalogue within a 100 km by 100 km square centred
on the Kirby Misperton 8 well from. The symbols are scaled by
magnitude.